Explore Essays and memoir
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First Catch Your Puffin
Sean French
‘A man is rescued after years stranded on a desert island with two companions, one of whom died.’
Men as Chickens
Geoffrey Beattie
‘She had offered four men £2,500 each to live like battery hens for a week.’
Nobody Need Starve
Amartya Sen
‘Famines can occur with or without substantial declines in food output.’
How It Ends
Andrew O’Hagan
‘Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing.’
Our Mother’s New Man
Andrea Ashworth
‘To keep her eye on the cost, our mother set the clockwork oven-timer ticking when she picked up the phone.’
Hitler and the Billygoat
John Sweeney
‘The court martial was held in secret, because it concerned the security of the state.’
Plato Speaks
Caroline Alexander
‘Photographs showed a wood-panelled room, furnished with a long table spread with a leopard skin.’
LA Women
Douglas Brooker
‘I was bored. That was how it started. Anything I ever did that amounted to anything–or not–has always been the result of being sick of doing something else.’
Trouble at the Waterworks
Edward Blishen
‘Old age is a sustained process of injury. You are being very distinctly shot at.’
The Boat People
Philip Gourevitch
‘My grandmother lived in America for forty years before her death, yet she never stopped referring to herself as a refugee.’
The Coral Reef
Tran Vu
'"So, our last night of socialism," Dzung said as he squatted down beside me. I pulled two cigarettes out of my pocket and handed one to him, but didn't reply.'
